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Wednesday, March 31, 2010

I spent the entire day sick on the couch, with a fever, and the girls took care of everything. (which is why I’m posting this 2 days later) Their brothers, Ella, the house, Keona even made dinner. They ate oatmeal, but they ate. They made Ella her bottle and put her to bed. They even handed me my camera so I could take my 365 picture while I was half asleep on the couch.

I was a bit undecided about which photo to use at first. I LOVE black and white photos, so I tend to do alot of them. This one of my oldest daughter is a fave of mine. Though, it’s kind of scary to see the “pre-teen” coming out in her…

Friday, March 26, 2010

We rarely take the kids out for fastfood. Rarely, as in never. Maybe, once a year. So when we dropped the 5 oldest off for a birthday party, and we were a 2 child family for a few hours, we decided to take them out for a treat. Jeddy had never been to McDonald’s with us before. It was funny to see how excited he was to have a meal in a box… and to find a toy a the bottom!

I had wanted to take the kids to the zoo over March break, but I also wanted to avoid all the crowds of March break… so we opted to wait a week, and we went today and bought our family pass. Jeddy had never been to the zoo before, and kept insisting that he wanted to go “see the monkeys!”

We had never seen the polar bear exhibit before, so we headed there first. We were all fascinated by these polar bears just lying on the hill top, when all of a sudden, they started to make this noise. It sounded like an eerie howling noise. The girls looked at me and said, “Mom, I didn’t know Polar bears made that noise.” Meanwhile, I’m thinking to myself, “Polar bears don’t make that noise…” Turns out we were looking at the Arctic wolf exhibit. Polar bears were around the corner… I guess that’s what I get for making fun of my sister! But seriously, when they were lying down, all we could see was white fur! Anyhow, I’ve never seen 8 wolves sit there and howl together. It was pretty incredible.

Then we made it to the polar bears.

For real…

As we were standing there watching them, Jeddy kept grabbing my leg, like he was nervous or something. I looked down and said, “What is your problem!?” “What’s wrong, hun?”

He looks behind me and says, “I”m scared of the geese!”

Yup. Not the bears… the geese.

The only reason Elijah came to the zoo (in his words. As if he really had a choice.) was to see the Komodo Dragon.

He is intrigued by any type of “scary” animal. He informed me yesterday that more people die every year from bee stings, than from shark attacks.

“I learned that in my ‘Predators’ book.” he says…

I warned the kids when we left our house, that we would only be making one bathroom stop at the zoo. The bathrooms are very few and far between… and that one bathroom stop would be after we ate lunch. My kids are smart… I didn’t even catch on to why they wanted to stop and eat lunch so early! ha… Smart or manipulative… Either way, we ate lunch with the jellyfish.

The girls are so content. They were just happy to be at the zoo. Happy to see any and every animal. The boys had a mission. After the Komodo Dragon- all I heard was, “Where are the lions? The tigers? The cheetahs?” They weren’t impressed by the cute little snowy owl, or the adorable little baby gorilla…

or the elephants. Slightly more by “Master Shifu”…

But this… this was amusing….

Ella wasn’t so fond of the giant orangutan statue.

So we had to do the picture without her…

We saw the cheetah…

And the tiger…

And finally we made it back to the lions!

The male lion got up just as we arrived, and stretch and did a growling yawn. Not an angry roar… just a little one. Then as he left, he stopped and posed for the camera.

We followed him over to the other side, and across the exhibit from us there was a rowdy group of teenage boys. As the lion walked over, they started yelling at it, and banging the polls… bad idea. The lion stood there and roared AT THEM about 10 times. I turned to the kids and said, “THAT was an angry roar…”

Stupid kids, but quite the sound to hear. Unbelievably powerful. It actually made me wonder what the voice of God must sound like. I mean, the lion’s roar made the ground rumble…

Then the kids stopped taunting it, and this huge beast rolled around on the ground like a playful little kitten.

At this point the boys were satisfied, and the girls and I were all starting to get cold and tired, so we decided to head out. Elijah offered to push the stroller for me.

And the girls figured huddling would keep them warmer.

I must have been asked, “Are they triplets?!” atleast 10 times today.

Maybe more…

I should have gotten a picture of Keona protecting Jeddy from the geese.

Keona, who screams and runs while flailing her arms and legs for 300 meters when she sees a mosquito, was protecting Jeddy –

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

None of the other kids moved slow enough for me to take a picture. Not that I could even find them in the gigantic park… Just before we left, it started to fill up with bigger kids, and they were blocking the slides, and pushing passed little kids. When they got in Ella's way, she just put her hand on their waist, as if they were one of her siblings and moved them out of her way. Jeddy just yelled, “Excuse me!!!” as he pushed through them.

On the way home Elijah said, “I hope there aren’t so many big kids blocking all the slides next time we go. I said ‘excuse me’ but they didn’t listen.”

Poor guy… he’s so soft spoken, they probably didn’t even hear him. The triplets ran around with eachother the whole time.

This was all while Keona was at her piano lesson across the street. She was quite excited to have gotten 248 points! She gets points for each person she performs for,(among other things) and she played at the nursing home last weekend for over 20 seniors! She's well on her way to the grade 1 piano exam.

And yes, I was lazy and did my poor excuse for a post on the 365 picture…

Monday, March 22, 2010

Good news is, the tempra has kicked in and Ella’s face is no longer bright red.

Bad news is… well, there really is no bad news!

Unless, you count me having to learn patience all over again, bad news… Kinda bad news. For me…

I get so used to just putting everything out there on this blog, than when something comes along that I can’t blog about- it drives me crazy! Like, almost back to my grade 5 self- going to buy a diary and all…crazy! No diary yet. But let’s just say, we have some decisions to make, and Scott and I are praying about them, and I’m patiently (or not so patiently) waiting to see where the Lord leads.

Last week was fun. SO much fun, that I really didn’t want to start school again today. The thought of cancelling school and just going on a nature walk, did cross my mind. But then it was cold, and windy, and rainy, and so I decided against that idea. The kids were all geared up and ready this morning, other than Ella who insisted on sitting on my lap the entire time. Things went rather smoothly for our first day back.

I was also told recently, that my kids “write like homeschoolers” by someone who shall remain anonymous… What exactly does that mean anyways??? Messy? My kids DO NOT … come to think of it… their writing isn’t the neatest I’ve ever seen. In reality, I was slightly horrified when I saw a note from my daughter’s friend, and she signed it “P.S. my writing is so messy because I’m in the car!” I thought to myself “That’s messy!?!? We have some serious work to do if that’s messy…” So we’ve added a time slot for writing practice in each day. I, am naturally, a perfectionist. I would practice writing neatly just for fun as a child. My sister on the other hand… I can remember erasing all of her homework and making her do it over again because I was embarrassed FOR HER to hand it in that way. I will have to share our progress a few weeks from now. Or not… we’ll see how it goes… :)

And to finish off, something that really made me laugh last week. We were out driving, and I was whistling to the music playing when Keona shouts, “Oh man! I thought that was me whistling!”

Almost as bad as my sister who when we were going to Jamaica, was talking about listening to the radio there when she was bored. My mom said, “Yeah, but you won’t get your radio stations there.” To which Sarah replied, “Well, then I’ll just bring my radio.”

What can I say, it runs in the family…

And just because he’s so cute! A few more pictures of sweet little Carson…

I love shooting from above my subjects. In this specific spot there were hanging tree branches all over the place, and in my way… so I went with it and shot through them. Though the branches create different angles in the forefront, I loved the angle of their faces. They were such a fun couple to shoot!